Reference: SFMOMA Publishes Digital Catalogue on Collection of Works by Robert Rauschenberg

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has published its first online collection catalogue, the Rauschenberg Research Project, which features nearly 90 works by artist Robert Rauschenberg that are part of the museum’s permanent collection. Accessed through SFMOMA’s website, the online catalogue presents a seamless blend of rigorous scholarship and multimedia resources drawn from new, existing, and related materials, taking full advantage of the breadth and accessibility of its online format. [Our emphasis] The Rauschenberg Research Project comprises the largest research effort the museum has ever devoted to a single artist with more than 500 images, videos, and research materials assembled for the project; the publication’s print equivalent would have totaled over 600 pages.

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In keeping with SFMOMA’s emphasis on artists’ voices, the project combines first-person perspectives and primary materials with the expertise of museum staff and outside scholars. Catalogue users can delve into a rich range of resources, including 19 newly commissioned essays by Rauschenberg experts in addition to 33 comprehensive artwork overviews that feature highly specialized images; videos of artist interviews or works in motion; detailed conservation reports; and other archival documents. Made possible by a grant from the Getty Foundation, the Rauschenberg Research Project is part of the Getty’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) and produced with the support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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For all catalogued works, the Rauschenberg Research Project offers significantly enhanced and amplified artwork overview pages with new brief summary texts; complete ownership, exhibition, and publication histories; notes on marks and inscriptions; and recently created high-resolution, zoomable images. In addition, the Overview page highlights select detail views and historical photographs that illustrate little-known aspects of each artwork and recent research discoveries. For instance, the catalogue entry on the early Combine Collection (1954/1955), contains a previously unpublished image of the artwork in its first exhibition in 1954–55 and a highlighted image showing significant changes to the piece made by the artist after the exhibition closed.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.